A eulogy almost always refers to someone who has recently died, but it is also used under other circumstances. The word, eulogize (to speak or write a eulogy praising someone or something) may be even more commonly used in non-death circumstances than in circumstances of death.

According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.

Jerry Seinfeld

Then I began reading from the eulogy I’d written.

John Green -- The Fault in Our Stars

Starks led off with a great eulogy on our departed citizen, our most distinguished citizen and the grief he left behind him, and the people loved the speech.

Zora Neale Hurston -- Their Eyes Were Watching God

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And instead of having eulogies from his bandmates or the people in town who he’d spent the last fifteen years with, some uncle from Boise got up and talked about teaching Kerry how to ride a bike when he was six, like learning to ride a bike was the defining moment in Kerry’s life.

Gayle Forman -- If I Stay

He followed by singing a haunting eulogy in a minor key.

Patrick Rothfuss -- The Name of the Wind

Caroline had contacted Ma’s best friend, a woman named Katie Lowe, to give the eulogy.

Scott Pratt -- An Innocent Client

Eulogies of German leaders, denunciations of traitors and saboteurs, appeals for the unity of the "Nordic peoples."

Corrie Ten Boom -- The Hiding Place

The woman read the stock report like a eulogy.

Alexandra Bracken -- The Darkest Minds

When I opened my eyes, which were fairly wet, I saw that everyone in the room had the same expression, one of those sad-but-happy ones that you see when there’s a good memory or joke shared in a eulogy or when your grandparents talk about their childhoods.

John Corey Whaley -- Nogin

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She introduces herself to Panem, identifies herself as the head of the rebellion, and then gives my eulogy.

Suzanne Collins -- Mockingjay

M. Krempe had now commenced an eulogy on himself, which happily turned the conversation from a subject that was so annoying to me.

Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein

And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament?

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

Louie wanted to give him a religious eulogy but didn’t know how, so he recited disjointed passages that he remembered from movies, ending with a few words about committing the body to the sea.

Laura Hillenbrand -- Unbroken

Pastor Harris gave the eulogy.

Nicholas Sparks -- The Last Song

Your eulogy would’ve been hard to write.

Rick Riordan -- The Throne of Fire

The principal did not just identify the bodies; he also gave a little one-or two-sentence eulogy each time.

Jodi Picoult -- Nineteen Minutes

She often chatted with Passepartout, who did not fail to perceive the state of the lady’s heart; and, being the most faithful of domestics, he never exhausted his eulogies of Phileas Fogg’s honesty, generosity, and devotion.

Jules Verne -- Around the World in 80 Days

Sir Isaac Newton’s burial, attended by kings and nobles, was presided over by Alexander Pope, friend and colleague, who gave a stirring eulogy before sprinkling dirt on the tomb.

Dan Brown -- The Da Vinci Code

Startled at the abrupt switching from the eulogy to herself, Scarlett went red with embarrassment as all eyes turned toward her.

Margaret Mitchell -- Gone with the Wind

Mr. Micawber then delivered a warm eulogy on Traddles.

Charles Dickens -- David Copperfield

He launched into a eulogy of his Eminence, and said that he should not have failed to enter into the Guards of the cardinal instead of the king’s Guards if he had happened to know M. de Cavois instead of M. de Treville.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Three Musketeers

The words were connected by no regular continuation, but as one ceased another took up the eulogy, or lamentation, whichever it might be called, and gave vent to her emotions in such language as was suggested by her feelings and the occasion.

James Fenimore Cooper -- The Last of the Mohicans

Social life, whether it was the crowning of a May queen, the eulogy to a dead president, or an all-night dance, could be held nowhere else.

John Steinbeck -- East of Eden

You can thus get the humans to accept as rhetorical eulogies of "being in love" what were in fact plain descriptions of the real significance of sexual intercourse.

C.S. Lewis -- The Screwtape Letters

Most notably, Cedric would have to give one of the eulogies.

Ron Suskind -- A Hope in the Unseen

Behind us lies a salty sea within which swim our drowning specks of memory—our small waterlogged eulogies.

Joy Kogawa -- Obasan

Gringoire was forced to content himself with this eulogy; for a thunder of applause, mingled with a prodigious acclamation, cut their conversation short.

Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame

She paused, as if rehearsing her eulogy, but her face remained dissatisfied.

E.M. Forster -- A Room With A View

The State Legislature stood in recess; Governor Ernest W. McFarland gave the eulogy.

James Bradley -- Flags of Our Fathers

Jerene’s brother, Pastor Lane Doerring, gave a eulogy, in which he added an appropriate twist to Christa’s favorite movie’s most famous line.

Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin -- Three Cups of Tea

It also took no great figuring to see that to deliver a eulogy for a convent full of crazy, old, overweight nuns was no way to endear herself to her peers.

Julia Alvarez -- How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

He could hear and feel every movement of the plane, and he heard also, with mixed feelings, Mallinson’s eulogy of himself.

James Hilton -- Lost Horizon

He began a rambling eulogy of what he called "Frog crumpet"—how plentiful, how available, how delicious.

Ian McEwan -- Atonement

—Edmund Burke’s eulogy of Charles James Fox for his attack upon the tyranny of the East India Company — House of Commons, December 1, 1783.

John F. Kennedy -- Profiles in Courage

Cotton offered up a fine eulogy to his young friend and recited a few examples from a storyteller he said he much admired: Jimmy "Diamond" Skinner.

David Baldacci -- Wish You Well

Chapter Eleven He had recently read a eulogy on a new method for curing club-foot, and as he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that Yonville, in order to keep to the fore, ought to have some operations for strephopody or club-foot.

Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary

Another time, in a misprint he hadn’t caught, Roberto’s article had stated that Senator Smathers had delivered an elegy, instead of a eulogy, of Trujillo before the joint members of the United States Congress.

Julia Alvarez -- In the Time of the Butterflies

If you ask me today what the reverend said, or what Missy’s brother said in his eulogy, I couldn’t tell you.

Nicholas Sparks -- A Bend in the Road

Brother Belie Jones didn’t give any eulogy, but he asked God to comfort the young widow and raise the baby in the Bosom of the Lamb, and then he read Scriptures for an hour.

Olive Ann Burns -- Cold Sassy Tree

Maybe delivered the eulogy, that’d be the kicker.

Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Identity

Is it a glowing eulogy or an accusation of levity?

Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2

Genevieve joined Charles Howard in the center of the paddock to hear a eulogy delivered by Joe Hernandez, the man who first called Woolf "Iceman."

Laura Hillenbrand -- Seabiscuit

It was a dull, excruciating affair with insufferable long-winded eulogies.

Pat Conroy -- The Lords of Discipline

My wish would be simply to present it to thee plain and unadorned, without any embellishment of preface or uncountable muster of customary sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies, such as are commonly put at the beginning of books.

Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote

…brother, so much injured, and to whom he was so much indebted, had suddenly arrived in his native kingdom, even the distinctions pointed out by Fitzurse did not altogether remove the Prince’s apprehensions; and while, with a short and embarrassed eulogy upon his valour, he caused to be delivered to him the war-horse assigned as the prize, he trembled lest from the barred visor of the mailed form before him, an answer might be returned, in the deep and awful accents of Richard the…

Sir Walter Scott -- Ivanhoe

…woman who even in his (Quentin’s) father’s youth had already established (even if not affirmed) herself as the town’s and the county’s poetess laureate by issuing to the stern and meagre subscription list of the county newspaper poems, ode eulogy and epitaph, out of some bitter and implacable reserve of undefeat; and these from a woman whose family’s martial background as both town and county knew consisted of the father who, a conscientious objector on religious grounds, had starved…